Smokescreen Turns Flash into JavaScript

As the war between Flash and HTML5 wages on, developers are finding all kinds of workarounds to get Flash-based advertising content onto the slew of mobile devices that can't or in some cases won't support Adobe's format. Chris Smoak's Smokescreen skips the Flash plugin and instead uses JavaScript and HTML5 to decode the media.

This is great news for banner ads, but for those of us looking forward to watching Hulu at the gym, Smokescreen is more than lacking, as video is hardly watchable on most mobile devices. What's more, in its current state, Smokescreen is 175KB and about 8,000 lines of JavaScript. There are bugs to be fixed, addition Flash support and improved performance also need to be achieved. To do this, Smokescreen is going open source later this month.

For previews and news on Smokescreen, head to smokescreen.us. We'll update the story when the tool becomes open.